Jen Dionne was one of my favorite professors at Stanford. She is both brilliant and joyful. In her short time at Stanford so far, she’s already been recognized by many for her creativity and scientific achievements (she was given the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the Sloan Research Fellowship, and was named one of the top 35 innovators under 35) . I took an electronic materials course from her when she was a brand new professor and I was impressed by her ability to make very complicated material understandable and fun. She once met me in her office on a Sunday evening to go over some topics I was struggling with and she patiently and enthusiastically went through the process of deriving Fermi energy levels on her white board. I liked her teaching style (and hanging out in her office chatting about physics) so much that I decided to take her inorganic quantum chemistry course just for fun. (Note: I know that sounds totally ridiculous, but she really is that great of a professor.)

Megan and I had a chance to Skype with Jen recently to hear about the awesome things she’s been doing at Stanford over the past few years since I graduated. One of the things she lights up talking about is the course she designed, ‘Science of the Impossible’. The class is a freshman seminar – professors apply to teach classes on any topic they propose and once a course is offered, freshman students apply to take the course. The idea is to give freshmen an opportunity to study a topic in great depth or from a new perspective. I took a freshman seminar, and it actually changed the course of my academic career – I was introduced to materials science through ‘Bioengineering Biomaterials to Heal the Body’, a course taught by one of my other favorite Stanford profs.

Jen tells us that she first became interested in teaching freshmen because “they just have a really great energy and curiosity that they bring with them”. She also knew she wanted to teach a science class because a lot of freshman classes in the sciences are “quite boring in the way they’re taught – Newtonian physics, balancing chemical reactions” – you have to learn the basics before stuff starts to get really interesting. So she brainstormed a list of topics that she finds fascinating and wanted to learn more about: “Teleportation – how does it work? Telepathy and psychokinesis, but in a more scientific sense. There was a really cool paper that came out a few years ago from people at Berkeley that showed that they could read people’s thoughts in an MRI and I was wondering ‘How does it work that you can observe patterns of blood flow to figure out what someone is thinking? If someone is in a coma, could we figure out what they are thinking?’ Also, self-driving cars. A couple of years ago Google was just developing their chauffer program to have driverless cars, so I wanted to explore the future of transportation”. And then she thought that all of these topics could be grouped together in a course about the science of the impossible – “studying things that may seem impossible but are allowed by the laws of physics, or are allowed by engineering advances”.

Now the classes includes the topics mentioned above as well as invisibility, photothermalcancer treatments, and stem cell treatments. “We also talk about technologies that were at one time thought to be impossible but are now part of our daily lives. For example – [we discuss] the history of computing and the Internet so students can really gain an appreciation for what really went into the advances that we now enjoy on a daily basis. When you send an email, there is a pretty amazing scientific chain of events that occurs. Electronic signals are converted into optical signals and transmitted across the Atlantic via undersea cables to wherever the main internet hubs are in the US – and it’s amazing how all of this happens in literally the blink of an eye.”

In the class, they discuss the science behind all of the ideas and technologies they explore, but they also consider the social implications. Recently, they had a discussion about the future of energy and climate change. Jen was able to get professional actors from the Bay Area who had written a series of plays on climate change to come in and perform for the students. “It was really thought provoking to consider what would happen if we continue on this path of using non-renewable energy”. They also discussed the implications of medical advances... what if technology advances to the point that humans can live to be 200 years old? “How would that impact the population of earth, and what would be required in terms of infrastructure and urban living? How can we make urban living more comfortable for people?”

Not surprisingly, this course has become wildly popular. The first year she taught it, 20 people applied and she took 16. The second year, 50 students applied. This past year, she had 300 applicants!! “It’s pretty exciting that so many freshman are interested in taking the class,” she tells us. “Just last week, we were talking about driverless cars, and afterwards this one girl came up – she was so sweet, she was like, ‘Jen, this class has changed my life.’ And I was like, ‘Oooohhh, thanks!’ That’s such a touching comment -- to have someone come in thinking they want to be a history major or a computer science major, but then they’re exposed to all of these different areas in science and see how cool it can be and how much of a difference it can make in the world.”

Jen and her son, Marcus. "He's the accomplishment I'm most proud of so far"

We ask Jen what her favorite “impossible” technology is that she’s working to develop in her own lab. After saying that having to pick a favorite project is like having to pick a favorite child, she tells us: “The one that intrigues me the most and has a lot of really cool research directions is our project on optical tweezing, where we are trying to use light to be able to trap, manipulate and image very small particles like proteins. I don’t know if you’re familiar with conventional optical tweezers, but the way they work is you use a focused laser beam to trap and manipulate objects. And that’s actually given people a lot of insight into how many fundamental biological processes work.

“For example, kinesin is a motor protein that walks along microtubules and carries pretty vital cargo in the cell. It carries chromosomes or neurotransmitters; it’s also a pretty good signal broadcasting system that tells the cell when it’s ready to divide. But people don’t really understand how this motor protein moves. So about 10 years ago, Steven Block, who’s also a professor at Stanford, realized he could use optical tweezers to get some insight into how kinesein was moving. So his idea was to take a focused laser beam, and use it to trap objects that are a couple hundred nanometers across. So he trapped a polymeric bead that then could be tethered to the motor protein. And then when he pulled on the bead, he could see how the kinesin responded to him moving this polymeric bead. And he was able to infer quite well how this kinesin was moving.

“So optical tweezing in general is a great tool to gain insight into biological systems. But there are two limitations. The first is that you can’t directly trap and manipulate particles much smaller than the wavelength of light. That’s a big challenge with conventional optical tweezers. And the second is that if you wanted to infer information about how kinesin is moving in a cell, you can’t do that right now because you can’t really inject 500 nm particles into a cell and expect things to move around naturally. So that’s another issue. You can’t directly manipulate the molecule; you have to tether it to something that’s 500 times its size and hope that when it’s tethered to something that big that it’s moving the same way.

“So that’s the prelude to say that our group is developing systems that can directly trap and manipulate small particles like proteins, potentially in cells. We’ve designed the optical tweezers, we’ve fabricated them, we have some preliminary characterization results that show that indeed, they are working like we expect them to. And I think that once we’ve fully developed the prototype, this will be a really cool tool for studying biological systems and how a number of biological processes are unfolding in cells with potentially nanometer scale resolution. So that’s the project I’m most excited about -- Developing these optical tweezers that can be used to manipulate and image small proteins within cells.”

I am so floored and excited by the implications of her work that I begin to stutter as Megan and I ask her follow up questions. How does it work exactly? What are your plans? Tell me more!!! “You don’t need to tether the protein to the bead. The protein usually has a diameter less than 10 nm, so based on the size of the protein and its structure, we can trap or target specific proteins and then move it around and see what it does. We have some designs that are agnostic to structure, so you trap everything of a given size. Then there are some proteins that are approximately cylindrical and maybe 7 nm x 4 nm, then you could trap all proteins that fall into that category. But there are certain macromolecules that may have all the same physical parameters – they may be the same size and have the same refractive index, but they may be chiral – maybe they have different handednesses. So we also have different traps that can trap proteins based on what chirality they are.”

What are her plans for applications? They first plan to recapitulate Steven Block’s experiments with kinesin. Second application? “We already have a patent on it – water purification and water filtration. Instead of having just one optical tweezer, you could have an array of optical tweezers. So if you have small impurities in the water, you can trap them with light as they are flowing past, and then have everything move along. So you don’t need a physical filter; you can just have an optical filter. The final application is in the pharmaceutical industry: “A lot of pharmaceutical companies synthesize drugs that are chiral and they spend a lot of time making solutions that are enantiopure. So if we could have a light-driven technique to take a racemic mixture and turn it into an enantiopure solution, that would be really cool. Although that is a more futuristic application because we can’t trap molecules that are just 0.5 nm yet.”

Jen on an adventure with her husband, Nhat.

Because I remember Jen telling me stories of going on crazy adventures as a graduate student at Cal Tech – huge bike races through the desert, for example – I ask her for advice for living a balanced life as a graduate student so I can have fun in my 20s. She says, “I think that having fun is not only for your 20s, but for always. I am a big proponent of the work hard play hard motto. And I also think that having balance is extremely important to being successful and being creative. So for me, and for my students, time to be able to recharge is just as important as time spent in lab doing the work. I try to encourage my students to have a pretty dedicated work ethic during the week -- making sure you have time to go to the gym for an hour a day or get out and enjoy nature or go for a walk or play some musical instruments -- but then try to take the weekends off when you can and just get out there and do the things you enjoy the most. And then I have found that what works well for me is if I take Sunday not so much as a full work day but as a day to have some fun, but in the afternoon start gearing up for the week so that Monday morning I can hit the ground running. And that may be the case where you’re doing some reading at night for a journal article to get your mind ready, or maybe you’re coming into lab for a couple of hours to get an experiment set up; I find that that helps me at least when I was a student to better optimize my time on Monday so that I could get most of the work done that I needed to during the week and then enjoy the weekend to pursue my hobbies. But I think balance is important and finding time to recharge is important. As scientists, we’re lucky enough that our work is also our hobby, which is a really cool thing. But it’s very easy to get sucked in to your work because it’s addicting and intriguing and there’s a eupohoric high that comes with getting an experiment to work, but I think it’s good to take a step back and just go for a run or have some hobby outside of work that gets the creative juices flowing.” For people who struggle to make time for hobbies, she recommends taking at least one whole day per week where you aren’t doing any work and just plan something fun. “Set your boundaries, and it can be a huge relief.”

After we say goodbye and close the laptop, Megan and I stay put in the library for a few minutes, basking in the sunniness and joy that Jen brings to a room, even if it’s through a computer screen – we’ve named it the Jen Dionne glow.

Sometimes, you just have to toot the horn of your blog partner/awesome friend’s horn: Last month, Megan helped plan an amazing evening called An Evening With Philly Biotech. She, along with a biotechnology master’s student and a medical student, invited a panel of young professionals working in the burgeoning Philly biotech scene to talk about their career paths and the awesome companies they helped found or work for.

Before the panel began, Carl June gave the keynote address. I’ve had a huge research crush on this guy for the past year and a half, so I was really excited to hear him speak. In case you don’t know about him, he’s a total bad ass who has shown that engineering a patient’s T-cells to find and kill malignant cells can be a life saving treatment for people with cancers that were previously untreatable (check out Chimeric Antigen Receptor T cells CAR-T cells here, here, and here). I think he might be the only cancer researcher ﻿I’ve heard speak who believes

that a cure for cancer is within our reach and he actually has some pretty compelling evidence to support his claims. By the end of his talk, the jaws of many grad students and med students in the audience were dropped and the number of people in the Carl June fan club increased by at least 30.

Once the keynote address was over and a lot of us were riding on a scientific high of Dr. June’s awesome data, the panel began. The four panelists were from very different backgrounds, but all were early in their careers.

Kristen Albright told us about her path from pharmacy school to an associate at a venture capital firm, Osage, that helps bring university-born technologies to market. When I chatted with her after the panel, she shared how insane and awesome the first few months in her new position have been. For me, hearing her story reinforced that the path you set out on initially won’t always ultimately be the path you find the most rewarding; it seems the risk she took

in diverging from her more predictable path as a pharmacist, to the world of VC, has been worth it.

Mahesh Narayanan got his Master’s degree in biotechnology at Penn, and then went on to found his own company, Pepvax, after working as a consultant for a few years. It was exciting to see someone so young start his own company in the biotechnology space. Sometimes it seems that you have to spend decades building up your scientific cred to convince investors. I was inspired by his ‘just go for it’ attitude and the success that he’s had.

Maria Chacon-Heszele is a life scientist at the start-up, Biomeme. She joined the company after her post-doc advisor moved his lab across the country and she needed to stay in Philadelphia. We have an interview with Maria coming up where we get a tour of Biomeme’s headquarters and learn about their awesome rapid DNA extraction and hand-held PCR devices. Maria also gave us some great personal and professional advice in that interview as well, so stay tuned!

Victoria Tsai joined the Penn-born company, Graphene Frontiers, as Senior Vice President of Business Development and Tech R&D after getting her PhD at Penn. In her case especially, I was struck by how many vastly diverse roles one person can fulfill within the start-up environment (just check out her job title!). Talk about never having a dull day!

To me, the two stages of the event (keynote address and panel) highlighted the two different career paths I’m considering. The first is the academic research environment, in which huge discoveries and advancements can be made, but commitment to a particular problem for decades is often required. Carl June told us that he started investigating how to grow T cells outside of the body more than forty years ago. Talk about a time commitment! Although CAR T cells seem like a technology that just took the cancer field by storm in the past couple of years, it actually took decades of perseverance through scientific and cultural obstacles. The second is the start-up environment, in which things change so quickly that adaptability and flexibility are just as important as perseverance. For now, I don’t know which environment suits me best, but it was awesome to get a window into both prospects in one evening.